OVHcloud is an industry leader for cloud infrastructure for blockchain and Web3 startups, delivering scalable, compliant, and secure cloud solutions made for decentralised applications, enabling the next era of digital trust.

Whether startups are building blockchain-native products or integrating decentralised technologies, our ecosystem offers the technical support, mentorship, and commercial resources they need to succeed.

Key partners in this accelerator that will help with your go-to-market needs are Degen House, Super Team Solana, Crypto Mondays, Alchemy and Dysnix.

Designed to be light-touch in terms of your time but high-impact in terms of value, the Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator offers everything that is OVHcloud (price/performance, energy efficiency, tech freedom, personal touch, decentralization and security of services) and more.

The 10-week program offers:

• €50k in free cloud credits to use on our Public Cloud solutions. This is in addition to Startup Program credits but the maximum total credits that can be allocated remains €100k.
• Deep-dives into blockchain, GTM strategies, sales training etc.
• Workshops on GTM, sales, investor readiness, and marketing to boost growth
• 1-on-1 mentoring from experts
• Engagement with corporates for possible POCs
• Engagement with Venture Capitalists (VCs) for possible funding

Up to 20 startups will be selected for the cohort of the Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator. Applications open on 4th of June, and the accelerator will run from 16 September 2025 to 20 November 2025.

Entries close on 7^th July 2025 (Apply NOW!) and selected participants will be announced on 23 July 2025.

The 10-week program is divided into 3 phases:

1. Phase I – Go-to-Market
   Focus on refining your product-market fit, marketing, and go-to-market strategy. You’ll work with our team to sharpen your positioning and business foundations.
2. Phase II – Build
   Deep dive into blockchain technology and cloud integration. You’ll collaborate with our Web3 and technical teams to optimize your infrastructure and unlock the full potential of OVHcloud solutions.
3. Phase III – Scale
   Prepare for investor engagement and scalable growth. This phase includes sales strategy and investor readiness, culminating in a final pitch at the OVHcloud Summit in Paris on 20 November 2025.

The accelerator program includes 1-on-1 mentoring from OVHcloud and external experts who will be matched with participants based on their needs. The program is designed to be agile, requiring only three hours a week or less, but can scale to support you as needed. It does also include a 1-year commitment to use OVHcloud’s products and solutions to ensure continuity after exit from the Accelerator.

Applications will need to meet the following criteria to be selected:

• You must be a Startup Program member that has been active in the program or as an OVHcloud customer for at least 1 month (not a member? Apply now)
• Your startup must be working with blockchain technology, but please note that we are unable to admit proof of work or mining blockchain creators into the program
• Preference will be given to Scale level members of the Startup Program

“Startups are an essential part of the blockchain ecosystem and one of the building blocks of the digital trust economy,” says Omar Abi Issa, Global Sales Director, Blockchain, Web3 and AI, OVHcloud. “Many startup ideas are created to solve business problems. However, most businesses and consumers experience these problems differently, and before businesses scale (and ‘go horizontal’) it’s important to learn enough about the market and audience so that your solution is truly innovative and useful.

As a former startup, OVHcloud understands what founders and their teams need, but as a global organisation which shares blockchain’s ethos of decentralisation, transparency and security, OVHcloud is in a unique position to help nurture and support the growth of tomorrow’s blockchain champions. We look forward to meeting latest group of companies participating in our accelerator, and are grateful to each and every application to the program.”

Startups like Bware Labs and Super Protocol have already enjoyed the benefits that the Fast Forward Accelerator offers.

“Our collaboration with OVHcloud has been very fruitful since we started using the platform and we are especially thankful to our account manager.” says Flavian Manea, CEO at Bware Labs

“We are very excited to work with OVHcloud, they are a reliable and high-performing partner. They have seamlessly delivered the growth of Super Protocol’s confidential computing infrastructure on which the future of Web3 is being built,” says Yulia Gontar, COO at Super Protocol

Sign up to the Startup Program and Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator today to benefit from a wealth of support – and scale your business faster.

This blog post will drill down on why Metal Instances play a crucial role in the enrichment of our compute portfolio, outline the key benefits that this new service brings to the market, and explain how organizations use such a services.

Metal Instances contribute to our IaaS and compute portfolio enrichment, offering more choices to customers

If you are already using our Public Cloud, you are likely aware that you can choose from a broad catalog of instances ranging from General Purpose, CPU-optimized, RAM-optimized, GPU, or I/O intensive instances to get the resources that you need on-demand and consume on a pay-as-you-go model. You might even be automating the deployment of these resources leveraging Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Ansible which are natively supported as our Public Cloud is built upon standard Openstack.

When looking at the bigger picture, the choice of instances is related to application workloads; not all apps are created equal and some workloads might require dedicated hardware resources for their execution, whether it’s for control, isolation, or performance. This is where Metal Instances come in. You can get a single tenant node with dedicated hardware resources and combine it with the on-demand availability and quick deployment times based on automation.

For a quick view of how Metal Instances fit into our overall compute portfolio, refer to the table below.

Metal Instances bring together the best of Bare Metal and Public Cloud

Now, let’s review in more detail what the benefits are for you.

• Single-tenant node, as a Service

There isn’t a virtualization layer installed on Metal Instances. You get root access, meaning that you have access to the highest privilege mode and can install any low-level software. All hardware resources available on the Metal Instances are dedicated to your usage and you control resource allocation.

• Integrated into the entire Public Cloud ecosystem

A simple way to look at Metal Instances is to view them as an additional building block for your app. As with any Public Cloud service, Metal Instances are consumed within a Public Cloud project where you can consume storage, network, databases, orchestration, and even off-the-shelf AI services.

• Available and scalable on demand

Getting what you need, when you need it is one of the key promises of our Public Cloud. Metal Instances can be deployed in a few minutes within your project and can be horizontally scaled up and down to match your workloads over time.

• Billed hourly and/or monthly

The benefits of pay-as-you-go have already been largely advertised, but are worth covering again in the context of Metal Instances. You pay for the hours used if you turn to hourly billing, which offers great flexibility for temporary workloads. On the other hand, if your workloads are permanent, monthly billing is another option.

• Natively compatible with Infra-as-code tools for full deployment automation

Infrastructure as code provides a great productivity advantage, as it saves your operations team from performing repetitive tasks when it comes to setup. Popular tools such as Terraform or Ansible are natively supported which makes things easier for standardized infrastructure deployment.

Key takeaways from our beta customers

About one hundred customers have been beta and alpha testing Metal Instances over the past months and feedback about their use cases provides insight into how you might use this new service.

Automation and industrialization

Several beta customers had the need to be able to install KVM and have access to the underlying tooling while being able to industrialize deployment as a best practice. If you’re already using an Infra as Code tool, Metal Instances can be a great time saver and there are a number of use cases around development or CI/CD which are worth considering

“We need to be able to add capacity at peak times automatically through an API. This does not work with regular dedicated servers that need 1-2 days of setup. We need new capacity in minutes“.

Specific software licensing

For licensing reasons, some applications require specific low-level software. We’ve seen this case with some beta customers that configure a Red Hat virtualized environment to run an Openshift cluster. The requirement is twofold—a certified hypervisor is required to run Openshift, but to standardize deployment, automation is needed too. Another case was from a customer moving to the cloud and concerned the installation of Windows Desktop in a manner to comply with the licensing for the application running atop while being able to reuse its automated workflow in the cloud.

Video related use case

With all hardware resources being dedicated to the workload, some beta customers wanted to implement video-related use cases such as conferencing or rendering.

“Metal Instances are a great solution for our heavy workloads because they give large amounts of resources for short amounts of time. We need to be able to increase our capacity during the day and vice versa at night.“

Typically, the fact that Metal Instances are available on demand, billed hourly, and can be automated, makes them a perfect solution in that light.

Wrapping up

The launch of Metal Instances is a key milestone and our teams that made this release possible deserve huge congrats! To get the full details about the products, go to our webpage: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/public-cloud/metal-instances

The table below provides the specs for Metal Instances. Hourly prices start from 0.5€ and monthly price starts at 170€ and the detailed price list can be found here: https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/public-cloud/prices/#419

Currently, Metal Instances are available in our Beauharnois, Strasbourg, Gravelines, Limburg, Erith, and Warsaw datacenters. Stay up to date with location availability here.

For new customers to our Public Cloud, you can take advantage of our free trial and test this new service along with our full catalog. We are always looking for feedback, feel free to reach out on our Discord channels. You may also want to check out our publicly available roadmap on Github and propose new features and interact with our Product Managers.

But how did we achieve that?

We coupled our dedicated server to a 4U JBOD enclosure containing 50 or 102, 14TB SATA drives.

The head server is a dual socket 6226R Intel Xeon (32 cores total) with 384GB RAM or 768GB as an option, 2x 480GB SSD for the operating system of your choice and 4x50Gbps Interfaces.
Drive management is handled by 2x Broadcom 9400-16e HBAs.

For even more performance,  as an option, you can order NVMe drives to handle and/or improve I/O caching:  4×3.2TB NVMe or 4x15TB NVMe.

Or you can use them to meet your low latency/random I/O workloads requirements.

Get the best of both worlds: spinning media for sequential writes or long-term storage and NVMe for high performance applications.

Let’s look at what we have:

•  a very large amount of storage space, that is dedicated to you
• the operating system of your choice (Bring Your Own Image or get your server pre-imaged with our tested distributions)
• freedom to configure and assign as you want
• vRack compatibilty
• HBA that supports software RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 6 and RAID spans 10, 50, managed by StorCLI/LSA (LSI Storage Authority software)

Storage is delivered raw, so that you can use your own method for drive assignment, partitioning, stripping/mirroring or use the StorCLI/LSA configuration software to, create:

• Disk groups: all physical drives in a disk group have the same RAID level
• Virtual disks: each virtual disk is assigned to a disk group and has its own cache attributes. All the virtual disks in the same disk group share disk I/O.
• Volumes: file-based or block-based storage space with the filesystem of your choice (OS dependant)

Let’s talk about use cases…

How you use it is really up to you, but let’s get you on track and give you a few examples.

1. Performance control

You’re a large virtualization user.

With HGR-STOR-2, you have complete control of your drives and volumes including their I/O.

As we know, random and sequential workloads have a very different impact depending on media and RAID configuration. With a standard volume, you don’t have a choice, all your applications have the same RAID level and run on the same disks.

With the HGR-STOR-2 server, you are given the power to decide. You can isolate your boot drives from your data drives by assigning them to different volumes, on different media if you have access to the NVMe drives.
Your database can reside on a dedicated RAID10 disk group and/or NVMe to benefit from random I/O performance, while the log partition would use RAID5/SAS disks for enhanced sequential writes speed.

And thanks to the 50/102 drives available, your volumes are freely extendable.

• Storage consolidation

The OVHcloud baremetal catalogue has multiple storage solutions and you find yourself juggling between  offers to meet different needs: resizing volumes when possible, moving data to new volumes, reconfiguring access and network….

HGR-STOR-2 is the answer, in terms of space available, evolution and performance. With both internal and external interfaces, you can access volumes from a public IP or from the Vrack.

Having a large capacity also means that if you don’t use it all today, you have unused drives that you can allocate on the fly to extend disk groups or volumes without the need to reconfigure volumes/shares/permissions. You’re just a couple of clicks away from extending your volume and being able to host even more data.

And with 4 network interfaces,  you won’t suffer from congestion and I/O bottlenecks.

• Disaster recovery

With vRack compatibility you take advantage of high bandwidth between OVHcloud datacentres and unlimited traffic at no additional cost. Deploy HGR-STOR-2 in multiple locations to backup/replicate your data and keep it safe. Using the operating system of your choice means that you have the liberty to install any software you’d like to leverage your expertise, extend your software licences usage all while assuring that your data is fully backed up and secure. Your data is synchronized across multiple sites and is available when and where you need it.

• Large data pool

Equipped with the dual Intel Xeon 6226R and with up to 768GB of memory, the HGR-STOR-2 is more than a great storage unit. It’s a real workhorse with 64 threads, capable of managing and processing large volumes of data.
And this data is accessible through 8 redundant SAS interfaces running at 12Gbps. Make latency  a thing of the past by selecting  the NVMe drive option. HGR-STOR-2 is ready for your data lake with up to 102 disk, 4 NVMe drives, fast interfaces in and out, and 64 threads.

The new OVHcloud Bare Metal HGR-STOR-2 unit is a unique machine in our storage portfolio. It is as close as you can get to a storage array and the processing power of a High Grade server. The range of options in regards of the number of drive configurations makes it flexible enough to suit all your needs. And if you require more, upgrades are available to match your growth, without complex migration or reconfiguration.

Our challenging cyberthreat environment has enterprises searching for new data protection, privacy solutions and best practices by their cloud providers. OVHcloud’s new Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers are equipped with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (formerly code-named “Ice Lake”) and Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). These unique technologies offer increased performance and leverage Confidential Computing for data privacy, regulatory compliance and stronger data protection.

Read this article to learn more about Confidential Computing and how you can benefit from these capabilities.

At the core of modern business transformation

As the world becomes more connected, businesses are experiencing a rise in data collection, use and storage. To process this data, new solutions such as cloud and analytics are emerging and transforming business operations. But these changes can also bring increased risk if security is not addressed.

We believe security, privacy and compliance must work alongside transformation, so we built our Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers using Intel® SGX – because it delivers Confidential Computing and increased data protection for our customers. Disk and network encryption can protect data while it is stored or in-transit, but traditionally, data is vulnerable while it is actively in-use inside the CPU and memory. Intel SGX creates hardware-protected “enclaves” designed to shield data and code from unauthorized parties or software while it is in-use. Data and code inside an enclave are not accessible by the cloud administrators or software stack, so your cloud host cannot access your organization’s private data, helping to comply with requirements imposed by GDPR and other regulations.

Rising to the security challenge with Confidential Computing

Enterprise data faces an increased threat from hackers, unauthorized third parties and malicious insiders, who often leverage exploits in other applications, or privilege escalations in the OS and hypervisor layers. And as software security improves, attackers have started moving down the stack to identify new vulnerabilities. This puts business-confidential or regulated data at risk. A data breech can result in severe monetary and reputational damage.

All of this means that perimeter defences are no longer enough. What is needed is a multi-layered defence strategy that makes it infeasible to execute a successful attack. Confidential Computing technology has become crucial for such strategies, as it uses a hardware-based approach to isolate data within a trusted enclave and encrypt it in memory. This protects data from vulnerabilities in the OS and hypervisor layers and ensures even users with full access permissions cannot decipher the data without a key.

Confidential Computing is “Compliance Computing”

Europe is setting the pace for the world in privacy and data protection, and organizations that handle personal or regulated data need to take steps to minimize risk of a breech or violation. That means deploying industry best practices and the latest privacy-preserving technology to maintain data security, sovereignty, and control.

Confidential Computing with Intel SGX can be a key part of a compliance regimen and help reduce regulatory risk. Not even a cloud provider like OVHcloud can access the data protected inside an enclave. In addition, OVHcloud offers attestation services so customers can receive cryptographic verification that their workloads are running on genuine Intel SGX hardware, the microcode is up-to-date and the software load is exactly what is expected. Attestation helps assure our customers their data is protected and compliant.

A new level of performance, confidence and security

The Advance-6 Bare Metal Server offers enhanced performance, while enabling solutions to be deployed quickly and at scale. It benefits from PCIe Gen4 and data centre grade NVMe disks, which boost bandwidth, and at the same time, OVHcloud Link Aggregation feature enables the two servers’ physical network links to be aggregated for optimal network speeds.

Advance-6 Servers also contain 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, which improve per-core performance with Intel® 10nm processes. They also contain Intel® SGX – the technology that drives Confidential Computing. Intel® SGX is built-in at the CPU level and enables data to be isolated inside trusted encrypted enclaves.

Intel® SGX also provides:

• Protection against attacks even if the OS/drivers/BIOS/VMM/SMM are compromised
• Increased protection for secrets (data/keys/passwords) even when the attacker has full control of the platform
• Defence against attacks such as memory bus snooping, memory tampering and ‘cold boot’ attacks against the RAM

Examples of Confidential Computing

Here are some examples within machine learning and cryptography:

Secure Multi-Party Compute

Organizations often need to collaborate but sharing data is prohibited due to confidentiality or regulation. Secure Multi-Party Compute is a privacy-preserving technique that enables multiple parties to pool their data and yield more accurate results, whilst keeping each party’s data private from the others. All parties can use the attestation capabilities to verify that their “data clean room” is operating properly and the software is what they expect. Intel SGX is being used today in multi-party medical research and financial fraud detection use cases.

Federated Learning

Federated Learning is a Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) method that deploys algorithms to decentralised devices or sites in order to create pooled analysis from data too large or sensitive to move to a common data clean room. In this use case, the algorithm is protected in an Intel SGX enclave while it conducts its analysis. After removing any private information, the results are related to a central node, combined with results from other nodes, and new weights or parameters are pushed to the remote models. This ensures sensitive data is not exposed to threats and helps organizations to build a more accurate model.

Key Management

Key Management is the practice of managing encryption keys, whether that’s generating and storing keys, or replacing keys for users. A common approach is to keep keys separate from data, often with Hardware Security Modules (HSM) – physical hardware designed purely for protecting and managing encryption keys and performing other authentication and encryption functions.

Mitigating data security and compliance risks is a big challenge with high stakes. OVHcloud’s new Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers with Intel SGX can help you rise to that challenge with hardware-based protections that defend your data from threats and help keep your organization compliant with privacy regulations.

Intel® SGX is available with Advance-1, Advance-2 and Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers.

By 2010, open source platforms, such as OpenStack, began providing open source virtualisation similar to VMware’s products. VMware and Openstack allow providers to run multiple virtual machines on a single server which has allowed cloud providers to provide IaaS in an efficient and cost-effective way. Typically, users choose their preferred operating system, hardware requirements and other features and then are set to install software applications or development environments. The latest development, in terms of cloud services, are known as containers. Containers lift user management from the operating system level to a level where containers, as well as what runs in the containers, is the only concern. This provides different benefits; such as the ability to isolate various parts of the applications you offer and reuse features to rapidly deploy new containers. The term “cloud native” refers to applications designed to run in containers.

Generally speaking, there are three basic cloud solutions available – Dedicated Servers, the Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud options.

Dedicated Servers provide the customer with access to dedicated server hardware and, by that, I mean that the customer is the only customer using that particular machine. The hardware, therefore, is private and not shared with anyone else. This option provides the most opportunity for performance and customisation.

Hosted Private Cloud offers customers the ability to deploy virtual machines across clusters of dedicated server hardware. Startups are changing the world; this means they are often working with very sensitive data or running business critical environments. If this is you, you may need a highly available platform with SLAs, and certifications for specific sectors to support compliance. A Hosted Private Cloud solution provides simple-to-use, reliable infrastructure for e-commerce, web and database apps with high availability and compliance measures. You can read more about the top Hosted Private Cloud providers in Europe in The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services In Europe, Q2 2020.

Public Cloud solutions refer to IaaS, where the hardware is shared with other customers. As a customer, you would have one or more instances (the public cloud equivalent of a virtual machine) running on shared hardware. Public cloud offerings give access to Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings on top of those instances, used mainly for application development and testing. Kubernetes, for example, provides the containerisation mentioned earlier, as well as Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions. As a startup, your business will likely be producing large amounts of data, and if you’re using cloud solutions, you’ll already be positioned to tap into the power of Big Data and AI solutions available in the cloud. Or, perhaps, Big Data and AI sit at the heart of the product or solution you provide? Either way, startups are accessing these solutions through the cloud as this case study shows. In addition, the Software as a Service layer, also utilised by startups, provides software applications that can be accessed by businesses from anywhere.

The Dedicated Server, Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud solutions all provide access to various data storage and backup options.

Cloud Benefits

With this introduction, let’s have a look at why your startup might need to build a cloud native application, move to the cloud, or migrate to another cloud provider.

As well as the obvious technology benefits, cloud infrastructure simplifies capacity planning management. For a startup, the workloads you experience will depend on your development stage. Early on in a startup’s development there may be periods of zero workload followed by big spikes when, for example, experiments are taken to market. Once there is market traction, a startup may experience workload spikes due to promotion activity or just rapid growth when product market fit is achieved. Cloud can make meeting these demands effortless; this is due to the elastic nature of the compute power. Cloud can also take the headache out of disaster recovery and other services designed to manage unpredictable events.

There are clear business benefits to cloud infrastructure, too. In fact, the place to start with any cloud strategy is your business goals. Whether you need to be ready to scale globally, provide certified solutions for specific industries, or alleviate unnecessary loads on your team – cloud infrastructure can help. With the current work-from-home challenges, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions mean your team can work from anywhere using SaaS productivity applications.

Any successful startup founder should also be actively seeking ways to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. In terms of costs, you need to check what your cloud provider charges for to ensure you have price transparency and no hidden surprises.

It is also important to know that many startups move everything to the cloud, and it works. Obviously migrating to the cloud requires specific skills within your team (read the article about getting the right cloud skills here).

Accessing the Benefits

As a startup, one of the best ways to benefit from the cloud, is to join a cloud provider startup program. These programs will often offer credits to access cloud solutions, as well as support. OVHcloud is a leading European cloud hyperscaler and has been a cloud and infrastructure provider for more than 20 years and offers one of these startup programs. To find out more information about the OVHcloud Startup Program and how to apply, go here.

What is the market situation?

For several months now, all sectors — including the cloud industry — have experienced difficulties provisioning electronic components such as motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, memory cards and network cards. More specifically, the shortage of semiconductors is what causes all of these supply difficulties. They are the basis for the design of any electronic component.

This shortage has several causes, which have mounted up over the months.

• The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in computer sales. It also led to a decrease in production capacity, with the series of lockdowns in many countries.
• The trade war between the US and China has led to taxes on various Chinese companies in the sector, such as SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation). The companies then fell back on the second biggest producer: Taiwan.
• A record drought in Taiwan slowed semiconductor production chains, because factories need thousands of tons of water to operate.
• International freight is also in crisis. Many shipping companies had reduced their fleets during the pandemic, but were caught off guard by the economic recovery in some countries. As a result, the cost of shipping goods by sea has skyrocketed.

We cannot be exhaustive about the many causes that add up and create this phenomenon, but it is clear that this chain of natural and economic hazards has really dealt a significant blow to this activity.

These factors have also highlighted how difficult it is to manufacture these critical components in the technology sector. Semiconductors are complex and expensive to produce. As a result, the number of companies and factories able to produce them in large quantities is reduced. In the face of skyrocketing demand during the post-pandemic economic recovery, the few market players capable of meeting it are facing production and transport difficulties (as detailed above). The resulting increase in the price of semiconductors also drives up the price of all electronic components that are dependent on them, saturating the market as a consequence.

What are the short- and long-term prospects?

If we look at cloud providers, this crisis is hitting us hard. Servers lack a variety of critical components for assembly. Due to high demand from the sector (especially in China), delivery times in Europe are considerably longer. Following the improvement in the healthcare situation in several regions of the world, industrial sectors are resuming their activity. Their production is increasing, and they need electronic components. At the same time, the companies involved in the production of semiconductors are at maximum capacity. This has led to market congestion, which has resulted in longer delivery times — and in turn, it has negatively affected our server production schedule.

As a result, we are seeing an overall increase in market prices. Due to a sharp increase in the prices of components we use to produce our servers, our production costs have increased as a knock-on effect. Many industry players do not see improvement in the short-term, as the demand remains constantly high, and tensions between the US and China show no sign of easing. Depending on the type of components involved and the materials they require, the situation may ease by 2023 (particularly for electronic chips). This obviously depends on geographical, environmental and geopolitical developments.

What impact does this have on the price of our products?

Thanks to our supply chain and long-term strategy for managing and provisioning component stocks, we were able to maintain the same price for our Scale and High Grade servers for several months. These ranges have been an enormous success, and demand has been high since their launch — so we plan to produce more servers, which requires us to order new stocks of components. From a manufacturing perspective, the increase in the cost of raw materials due to their scarcity — as well as the increase in energy prices — has left us no choice but to raise how much we charge for our products.

We delayed this price change for as long as possible, in the hope that this period of price increases for our suppliers would not last. Unfortunately, this situation is not expected to return to normal until 2023. We will need to adjust the pricing for our Scale and High Grade dedicated server ranges, as well as their options. An individual communication will be sent to you one month before this price increase, to inform you of the new prices.

Will the price increase apply to Scale and High Grade servers ordered prior to this change?

We are aware of the financial impact this change may have on customers who have already subscribed to one or more dedicated servers, so we have taken the decision not to increase the prices of servers already delivered or awaiting delivery.

How will we limit the impact of this price increase?

In the next few weeks, we will modify our Scale range to limit the price increase for customers who do not need storage disks in addition to the system disks included by default. This market demand will meet the expectations of customers who want to create an infrastructure with proxies and/or web front-ends. The other change applies to the SCALE-1 server, which will be available with 128GB memory by default. The purpose of these adjustments is to limit the impact of the price increase on the Scale range, while meeting market expectations.

As a reminder, the Scale and High Grade server ranges are available with long-term commitments (up to 5 years) via our sales team, giving you billing discounts of up to 30%.

Our teams are available to discuss the current market situation and delivery times, and support you in your future projects.

Regardless of where your Windows or Linux servers are located, how confident are you that in the event of a major disaster, that your business can continue as usual?

While there are many awesome SaaS cloud solutions that don’t require any servers, the reality is that many companies (of all sizes and types) require their “own” server. It might be in the office, in co-located servers they own, or with a VPS or dedicated server with a provider like OVHcloud. There are many reasons, from personal preference to compliance to security to cost and compatibility. 

Read on to learn how custom requirements require creative solutions for Disaster Recovery (DR), and how to build confidence that your IT infrastructure can withstand major failures.

Case Study – RetailCo and Software Co

This article is based on our with two clients that had somewhat similar requirements, so we could reuse the designs our engineers created. Both have a mix of Windows and Linux servers.

Client #1 we’ll call RetailCo. They have over 12 retail “bricks and mortar” locations in Western Canada, with a growing online e-commerce capability. The core application runs on Windows servers with Microsoft SQL Server and Remote Desktop Services (RDS) clusters.

Client #2 we’ll call SoftwareCo. They have a large office in the Vancouver area with over 100 employees, many of who are software developers and creative artists in the mobile app industry. In the event of the failure of their office or downtown Vancouver hosted server, they wanted the confidence that business operations could continue with perhaps several hours of IT work to flip over to the OVHcloud servers in Quebec-Canada.

Backup and Recovery isn’t enough

Basic backup has been around for many decades. Traditionally, the storage method was via magnetic tape drives connected directly to each server. This transitioned to hard drives as capacity increased, prices dropped, and they become more portable with easy USB connections. And as high-speed internet became more common, then online cloud backups arrived.

From the new clients we talk to, pretty much everyone has backups. However, there are often major issues: the backups are often not automatic or tested. Somebody might be taking a tape drive or removable USB drive home every day or week in their purse, but it’s empty because the backup job failed and nobody watches it. Or, the drive may have corrupted.

It’s also very common that while the backup job may be monitored and validated as recoverable, that the recovery is very time consuming. It may require hardware to be available that is 100% identical to the original failed hardware. Or it may require a time consuming data or physical shipment of storage media to the recovery location. Having recoverable data and actually restoring operations is two very different things: with some backup methods, it could take a week to restore business! Even if the backup jobs have been reliably running every single hour.

With RetailCo’s previous managed hosting provider, backups were technically in place. However, it was a file/folder backup method only, and backups were only stored within the hosting provider’s facility. That meant that if a server failed, a technician would have to create a new virtual machine, install Windows, join to the Active Directory domain, install all the required software, manually configure everything, and only then restore the files to the new server. That process could take several days depending on the role and complexity of the failed server!

Image-based backups have existed for over 10 years now; these are very helpful but still do not guarantee a quick recovery. If the original hardware has failed for whatever reason, it can take weeks to procure a suitable replacement. It depends a lot on on the type of failure.

Replicating data to long-term “cold” or “cool” storage in Amazon or Azure can be very cheap and easy to do. However, getting the data back out and up and operational can be very time and labour-intensive. Clearly, creative solutions are required.

Every year brings new failure situations to account for

When it comes to IT and the ways that systems can fail, every year is a new opportunity for new types of failures. We have the classic threats of hardware failure, power outages, and earthquakes. Over the last couple of years, even here in Western Canada we’ve seen new situations:

• 100-year floods, trashing highways and transportation routes – I couldn’t leave my town
• Covid-19 and Remote work changing how systems are accessed
• Increased ransomware demands (over $1M) and cyber insurance requirements.
• Intelligent intrusions – hackers actively deleting backups
• Record heatwaves causing air conditioners to fail
• Human error, due to increasing IT complexity
• New regulations and compliance requirements in various industries

My conclusion is that we all need to be prepared for a variety of situations. 

Moving past Archaic Backups and Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity

Clearly, just having recoverable backups is not enough. We need to move the conversation past backups and Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity. In other words, what does the business require at a minimum to continue operations? How important are the data, applications, and digital communications? Is it acceptable for them to be completely unavailable for a week while they are being recovered? What is the true cost of downtime, considering not only expenses but lost revenue, reputation impact and damaged customer confidence?

In the case of RetailCo, they indicated that “continuation of business” means that stores are open and transacting. Perhaps not in a beautiful ideal scenario, but open for business and able to take payment. As their primary servers are in Vancouver, we configured a warm standby of their database and web portals in OVHcloud. In a failure of the primary servers in Vancouver, cashiers would be able to sell goods to clients using the web version of the point of sale software, even though the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) cluster was offline. The full restore of the environment would take a significant amount of time, however the core function of the business (store fronts and warehouse) would continue to operate while restoration took place.

For SoftwareCo, they didn’t have any significant software running on their Windows servers; primarily they were used for Active Directory authentication and internal DNS only. These servers are mission critical for remote VPN access and authentication. So, we setup active AD and DNS replicas in the OVHcloud, and replicated image-based snapshots of all servers and data to OVHcloud. This allowed for instant failover of the essential AD/DNS servers, with quick recovery of file data should that be required. All data was kept in the “private Cloud” – servers under the clients control. This fulfilled their requirement for georedundancy and client managed storage. 

These custom solutions provided all components: 

1. Fast recovery by using real-time data replication to servers located 4000 km away. The advantage is that it doesn’t matter how often we’re backing up or how long it takes to recover. 
2. Frequent incremental data backups to multiple locations (onsite and offsite)
3. Image-based drive backup technology for ease of restoration
4. CyberSecurity data protection through encryption and different chains of command and control

The following diagram provides an illustration of the overall design for the RetailCo business continuity design.

Our checklist for high confidence server backups

1. Executive written approval on backup frequency and recovery time objectives. For each service and server:
   1. Agree on how often backups need to be created. This is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Example: your website may not change often, so a monthly backup is sufficient.
   2. Agree on the maximum time it must take to recover. This is called the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Example: The website doesn’t change often, but it’s critical for sales and marketing so must be restored to service within 2 hours.
   3. Agree on retention policies. This may impact storage costs. Example: for the website, we only need to keep a backup as old as 3 months ago. Example: for the accounting database, we need to be able to recover data from 1 year ago.
2. Design and implement a backup system that actually fulfills the approved RTO and RPO strategy.
3. On a regular basis, test the backups to confirm they are recoverable in the agreed-upon objectives.
4. On a regular basis, audit all IT systems (including Shadow IT services) for new data that may not be sufficient backed up.
5. Have multiple local backups, for the quickest recovery.
6. All backups run automatically, with health monitoring and alerting on failures.
7. Security controls are in place, so that ransomware, malware, viruses, and hands-on attackers can’t delete either local or remote backups.
8. Encryption is in place for backup data at rest (onsite and offsite) and in transit (whether USB drive or Internet upload).

Why OVHcloud is great to work with?

1. Costs: Dedicated hardware is more under the client’s control and there is additional cost for testing or production use.  It’s a happy medium between the cost savings of CapEx vs Lease vs Pay-as-you-go.  For clients who need multiple virtual servers with lots of CPU and RAM, OVHcloud generally provides more bang for the buck then AWS or Azure.
2. Ease: The addition of new hardware is a few clicks in the ordering page, unlike with client owned datacenters equipment where it can take months to order and install new hardware. The OVHcloud portals and dashboards are also much easier to navigate then AWS and Azure, which can get quite complicated.
3. Real hardware: with direct access to the hardware, the only limit to the number of virtual machines is the amount of RAM and CPU in that OVHcloud dedicated server.
4. Data Sovereignty: OVHcloud is a Non-US Cloud service provider and the Data Centers are in Quebec & Europe.
5. Predictable pricing : OVHcloud provides cloud services with simple billing and no hidden costs. No Ingress-egress Fees for customers wanting to move data around.

Our approach – vendor-neutral

Our approach is not a pure-cloud one; we prefer being more pragmatic about it. We’re happy to design Multicloud solutions but if possible it’s great to stay vendor neutral. Being locked into one ecosystem can be problematic for some companies. Thus, we have maintained the people, skills, tools, and process to support a variety of platforms and configurations.

Crafty Penguins – Linux Managed IT services

Our Crafty Penguins division specializes in Linux consulting and server management. Check out the technology stack and service pricing pages to learn more. Many clients start with a Discovery Project for an assessment and health check of their current servers.

Kerkhoff Technologies – Managed IT Services & IT Consulting

Our Kerkhoff Technologies division provides Managed IT Services for clients using Windows & Linux systems.  Check out our service and technology stack pages to learn more.  Need an assessment, security review, migration or new server setup? Reach out and schedule an introductory call.

The Beginning of a Revolution

OVHcloud offers a wide portfolio of cloud products and solutions across its four universes (Web Cloud, Bare Metal Cloud, Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud). The cloud we deliver is always designed and developed with our customers in mind, and we’re always looking to understand their business so we have a better idea of their challenges.

We started our discussions on the Premium Bare Metal Cloud market back in 2016. At that time, we received feedback from a few customers regarding our price positioning on this particular range of powerful servers, which meet very high storage requirements. Our bare metal products were simply too expensive in comparison to what they were willing to pay for. We then worked with two customers in particular. Since they were open to share their costs with us, we were able to project their economic model onto our business model. These two customers hosted their own services via colocation, without a local team available 24/7, and they had a low-capacity internet network. They invested in their own servers by calculating their prices across a 5-year period. Once we performed this analysis, we realised that we could offer them these powerful servers for a lower, much more competitive price. But to meet this challenge, we would need to do some major work that would probably take several years.

A New Business Model

Our first project involved completely restructuring the mathematical basis of our business model, which we used to calculate our prices. We started this in 2017, and it took three years.

In our first year, we reorganised the company and created Units. Each of the Units is a kind of small business within OVHcloud. It contributes to our collective success by managing responsibilities corresponding to its expertise, and by contributing to our strategic plan. It is led by a Unit Lead, and has a roadmap to deliver.

In the second year, we created P&Ls for each Unit so that they could model the projects in their roadmap, through real costs generated compared to the expected benefits. To provide them with this analytical framework, we had to restructure our finances. This involved dividing the company’s overall P&L into several micro P&Ls. This meant we could allocate costs to the right Units and create an internal billing workflow. We were then able to calculate the revenue of each Unit by reconciling the revenue generated by customer billing with the revenue generated by the internal chargeback for other Units, while integrating the associated costs (teams, licences, etc.). We then had the margins released by each Unit.

In the third year, we linked all these metrics to financial statements, and made their KPIs available to Units in real time. The purpose of deploying these financial dashboards was to better manage the company’s efficiency — but more importantly, to empower the teams. By aligning financial monitoring tools with the new organisation, Units were able to produce more reliable forecasts, better anticipate risks, and better project their investments and salary expenditure. For the company, it was also a way of ensuring that every project created value for OVHcloud, as well as continuing to ensure that our development remained profitable, balanced and sustainable for our competitiveness and independence. From the customer’s point of view, this cost-conscious culture would mainly lead to even bigger price reductions.

In the digital world, economies also rely on two shifts: reducing fixed costs (by increasing sales volume) and reducing variable costs (by automating tasks through software, robotic systems, and artificial intelligence). Investing massively in automation is a crucial challenge for a cloud provider like ourselves. Through massive investments, we improved quality (fewer bugs, simplified procedures, faster service delivery), and we were able to carry out more operations per day, without increasing the size of the Units. This meant the Units no longer had to do repetitive tasks, and they could instead focus on the added value they needed to bring to our customers. We do this by following the principles of BFLNT, which I described in a previous blog post.

Finally, this combination of operational and financial efficiency — as well as the level of automation in Units — helps us develop increasingly cost-effective solutions, and provide even more value for money to our customers.

CAPEX is Value

To support their ambition, companies that incur a high CAPEX — through spending high amounts on real estate or equipment investments — are never highly valued on the financial market. To secure these large investments, they often operate complex — even opaque — financial schemes that are perceived as too much of a risk.

For OVHcloud, these large sums are the foundation of our virtuous model — investing in building and improving our datacentres, renewing our production equipment, and acquiring new manufacturing premises. Our business model completely demystifies these massive investments, because it ensures returns on investment by design. Our ability to invest by generating profitability has enabled us to raise capital in 2016 ($279 million from KKR and TowerBrook) and even raise debt at the end of 2019 ($976 million). CAPEX is our main vector for creating value. We must constantly invest in future innovations and infrastructure to ensure our sustainability and competitiveness.

With all the work we have done over the last three years, we have also been able to make huge changes to our business model. With the sophisticated analysis we gained, we can now calculate a server’s price based on multiple variables like commitment time, order volume, server type, and investment spending on the infrastructure and the business itself. This new financial model is internally called “Jackpot”, as any reduction in our CAPEX or OPEX (operating expenses) will certainly lower the price for our customers. And in the event that we don’t provide the price expected — which means that our CAPEX or OPEX solutions are not sufficiently optimised — we are always looking for where we can innovate, and what level we need to disrupt. Because if we improve our costs, we reduce our prices rather than increasing our margins. This constant self-reflection through innovation is what enables us to offer customers better prices, as we will soon be doing with a Premium Bare Metal Cloud.

New resource usage methods

Our ambition is to become a global expert in Premium Bare Metal Cloud. We want to shake up the market from 350 to 2,500 dollars per month (for the top-range premium servers) and become a benchmark, as we are already doing for entry and mid-range servers. Customers who need the most power and capacity will start to notice the first effects of our strategy. To better serve their challenges, by the end of 2020 they will see our public prices drop. But we will maintain the same high performance. In addition to our industrial model, which is unique in its total control and enables us to adapt constantly, it is mainly our new “Jackpot” business model that has helped us go even further in recent months. And based on this new model, we have reviewed everything — servers, network, energy and water-cooling. Now more than ever, we are a price leader by design.

By allowing us to follow product life cycles with greater finesse, our new financial model has also enabled us to review our commitment models. Before the end of the year, we will offer more competitive prices on longer-term commitments. In addition to the monthly payment models already available, i.e. with no commitment or with a commitment of 6, 12 or 24 months, we will also offer commitment plans over 3, 4 or 5 years. Our prices will be even better for customers who are able to commit to both volume (3 or 12 racks with 48 or 96 servers) and duration (3, 4 or 5 years). In the future, our customers will also be able to get Bare Metal prices per hour, billed per second.

Finally, for customers who need a lot of server racks and don’t want to manage their infrastructure, we can already deliver private spaces in our datacentres, with 12, 24 or 48 racks* equipped with cameras, badges and logs. This use case not only meets the needs of Bare Metal Cloud customers, but also Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud customers in “private region” mode. From 100 racks onwards, we are able to deliver true private datacentres in third-party buildings (customers’ premises)*, wherever they are in the world. This significantly reduces their costs. For these datacentres, we deploy our industrial and technical expertise, including our exclusive water-cooling technology, and all of our hardware innovations — including the very latest technology on the market. We also manage all software layers and their lifecycles.

A Global Impact

The purpose of this blog post is not to detail our future offerings, but to explain the long journey that has led us to drop our prices on Premium Bare Metal Cloud. But if you follow my Twitter account (@olesovhcom), you may have seen some previews of them — because I share information about our work regularly.

In all, OVHcloud will soon offer around 300 Bare Metal Cloud models! This is a very wide range, and our marketing teams have taken on the impressive challenge of offering a simplified browsing experience, so that you can find exactly what you need. In late October 2020, the menu name will change from “Server” to “Bare Metal Cloud”. This will be the first step in a transition that will take place in the coming months, with a much more usage-based approach, such as virtualisation, storage, deep learning, databases, etc. The aim is to make your journey easier, and help you easily pick the models that best suit your needs.

As internal customers, our three other cloud universes (Web Cloud, Public Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud), which all rely on our Bare Metal Cloud infrastructures, will also benefit from these innovations and new prices. Before making this global impact, we needed to review the fundamentals of the cloud. Expect some great announcements in 2020-2021!

To find out more, head to the OVHcloud #EcosystemExperience, our new virtual event, on the 03rd, 04th and 05th November.

We will prove to you in concrete terms that by thinking out of the box through disruption and creating a solid ecosystem, we are helping to make OVHcloud a genuine alternative in the cloud industry every day.

Octave Klaba

Founder & Chairman OVHcloud

*Interested? https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/contact-sales/

What is a cloud-ready image?

For those who don’t know, cloud-ready images are a pre-installed distribution that come in the format of a single file (RAW, QCOW2, OVF,…), and can be booted by a hypervisor to have a system ready in seconds, without having to endure all the installation process.

As you can have a lot of different VMs based on these images, it’s kind of a One-Size-Fits-All situation – making them pretty interesting to work with.

You may ask ‘How can I set things like hostname, network, ssh key, on this server prior to booting?’ This is where cloud-init and instance metadata come in.

What are cloud-init and instance metadata?

Cloud-init is a solution developed by Canonical to be the ‘industry standard multi-distribution method for cross-platform cloud instance initialization’, and as far as we’ve used it, it works pretty well.

Cloud-init is a service that runs at first boot to resize your partitions, configure hostname, network, to pass and execute scripts, to tell other services that it’s alive, and other possibilities.

All of this information is held on instance metadata which can come in many forms. Mostly, perhaps, as  a cloud-provided metadata, in the form of a collection of JSON files. Below is an example of a meta_data.json file.

{
  "keys": [
  {
    "data": "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2AACABQCnZ0Ma2nE99GXH== jcollin@ovhcloud.com",
    "type": "ssh",
    "name": "key1"
  }
  ],
  "public_keys": {
    "key1": "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2AACABQCnZ0Ma2nE99GXH== jcollin@ovhcloud.com"
  },
  "uuid": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-abcdefghijkl",
  "availability_zone": "nova",
  "hostname": "myhostname",
  "devices": [],
  "launch_index": 0,
  "project_id": "abcdefgh-4321-4321-1234-lkjihgfedcba",
  "name": "myhostname"
}

How does that work on BareMetal?

It’s almost the same as the cloud way, except it requires some extra work. As we work with OpenStack, we want to apply the cloud process to baremetal servers. It’s heavily inspired from Ironic, the OpenStack Baremetal module.

The image

For this example we will use the case of the newly available RedHat© Entreprise Linux, and as we can provide two ways of having it on your server, the process is roughly the same.

We use the official cloud-ready RHEL image provided by RedHat©, use it on our own template factory, made with Packer and OVHcloud Public Cloud, to download and pre-install packages that will be used later in the installation process, such as mdadm, lvm2, and others.

The image is then pushed on our mirror infrastructure that will distribute this image to the service that will perform installation.

The process

To install such an image on your bare-metal server, we boot it on a rescue-image and perform a lot of operations on it, such as:

1. wiping the disks
2. setting up the partitions, and RAID (if any)
3. creating the config-drive partition (we’ll talk about it later)
4. mounting all setup partitions in a temporary folder
5. rsyncing the image in the temporary folder
6. making it bootable (later on that part)

• if the distribution needs to have a license, one additional step is required, like:

1. registering against the RedHat© Subscription Manager’
2. rebooting
3. waiting for phoneHome

config-drive

This, is the source of our instance metadata on bare metal servers. It contains all the necessary files for cloud_init to set and configure the system at first boot.
It’s a little (1MB) partition with ISO-9660 file system (yes, that means read-only), that will be detected by cloud-init-service instead of the standard meta_data.

Making the image bootable

Behind this barbaric name there is a well polished process that involves a lot of tweaking. Luckily for you (and us), all of this is automated, even if the tweaking is done manually at first.

• creation of /etc/fstab
• configuration of grub with some specific presets
• installation of tools like lvm2, mdadm
• creation of /boot/initramfs with additional drivers
• grub installation
• syncing of /boot/efi partition

All of this will ensure that your server will be able to boot gracefully.

phone-home

Phone-home is a cloud-init feature we have outsourced to be sure it will work, even if you decide to have a first boot script that will delete all traces of cloud-init.

It’s a simple script that will execute a HTTP POST to a home-made service. This lets us know that the server is finally booted, and that just after the first steps of cloud-init, the original one will wait the end of the process, and make the call only when you can log into your server.

What makes all this tricky?

Well, that is a good question! We try for this process to be as simple as possible, and that’s a hard task, because every distribution is different, even the same distribution on a different version can be different.
For example, we provide 4 kind of RedHat© Entreprise Linux

Tweaking for RHEL 7 is a little different than for RHEL 8, but you have the same scripts to apply (or not apply), when it comes to the licensing. Since we have no way of licensing for RHEL, the standard method for purchasing a license from OVH is the ‘BYOL’ way which stands for: Bring Your Own License.

Is RedHat© this complicated?

Really, no. But RedHat© has standards, and we have to respect them, so there are challenges.

Before being able to sell RedHat© Entreprise Linux on Baremetal, we had to certify each of our flavor with hardware tests, such as network, computational, disks access, memory, virtualization capabilities, and more. The process is long, but you ought to know what you are doing even better, because even if each distribution is different, each server is too.

So, yeah, we are proud to say we achieved this feat like other major manufacturers.

• Certified ADVANCE Range
• Certified INFRA Range

The future

As I told you before, this process is quite close to OpenStack Ironic, and if it might even be the future in terms of providing Baremetal as a Service – a little work on your cloud-ready image may still be necessary.

And if you’re up to the challenge, maybe make your own image to install it on your fresh servers with the soon-to-come Bring Your Own Image feature that is in development right now!

IPMI was created in a cooperative partnership between Intel, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and NEC. Since its creation, it has become an industry standard as an important hardware solution that allows Server Admins to monitor hardware status, log server data, and allow access to the server without having physical access of the server. By accessing a server through IPMI you are granted access to the system’s BIOS, having this access allows you to install or reinstall your own operating system, fix any network misconfigurations, or re enable SSH or RDP access using KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) access to a server.

By utilizing OVHcloud® infrastructure you will be able to use IPMI and have access to your server’s BIOS. This enables you to be an effective server administrator and troubleshoot any issues you may have with your server as well as install any operating system compatible with your server’s components.

At OVHcloud it’s important to us that our customers have the freedom and flexibility to innovate solutions to any challenge or problem they see before them; utilizing IPMI is one way we can give our customers such freedom.

To learn more about how to access IPMI from your OVHcloud Manager and how to install an operating system utilizing IPMI please consult the following guides that take you step by step through the process: Getting Started with IPMI, How to Install an OS with IPMI.